Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
as security, resource management, information
services, and data management.
Obviously, in this article, it seems impossible
to present and discuss the complete spectrum of
applications and their adaptation and implementa-
tion on grids. Therefore, we restrict ourselves in the
following to briefly describe the different applica-
tion classes, present a checklist (or classification)
with respect to grouping applications according
to their appropriate grid-enabling strategy. Also,
for lack of space, here, we are not able to include
a discussion of mental, social, or legal aspects
which sometimes might be the knock-out criteria
for running applications on a grid. Other show-
stoppers such as sensitive data, security concerns,
licensing issues, and intellectual property, were
discussed in some detail in Gentzsch (2007a).
In the following, we will consider the main
three areas of impact on porting applications to
grids: infrastructure issues, data management is-
sues, and application architecture issues. These
issues can have an impact on effort and success
of porting, on the resulting performance of the
Grid application, and on the user-friendly access
to the resources, the Grid services, the applica-
tion, the data, and the final processing results,
among others.
described here, closely following the description
in Jacob at al. (2003).
Applications and Security
The security functions within the Grid archi-
tecture are responsible for the authentication
and authorization of the user, and for the secure
communication between the Grid resources. For-
tunately, these functions are an inherent part of
most Grid infrastructures and don't usually affect
the applications themselves, supposed the user
(and thus the user's application) is authorized to
use the required resources. Also, security from
an application point of view might be taken into
account in the case that sensitive data is passed to
a resource to be processed by a job and is written
to the local disk in a non-encrypted format, and
other users or applications might have access to
that data.
Applications and Resource
Management
The resource management component provides the
facilities to allocate a job to a particular resource,
provides a means to track the status of the job while
it is running and its completion information, and
provides the capability to cancel a job or other-
wise manage it. In conjunction with Monitoring
and Discovery Service (described below) the ap-
plication must ensure that the appropriate target
resource(s) are used. This requires that the applica-
tion accurately specifies the required environment
(operating system, processor, speed, memory, and
so on). The more the application developer can
do to eliminate specific dependencies, the better
the chance that an available resource can be found
and that the job will complete. If an application
includes multiple jobs, the user must understand
(and maybe reduce) their interdependencies.
Otherwise, logic has to be built to handle items
such as inter-process communication, sharing of
data, and concurrent job submissions. Finally, the
APPLICATIONS AND THE
GRID INFRASTRUCTURE
As mentioned before, the successful porting of an
application to a Grid environment highly depends
on the underlying distributed resource infrastruc-
ture. The main services components offered by a
Grid infrastructure are security, resource manage-
ment, information services, and data management.
Bart Jacob et al. suggest that each of these com-
ponents can affect the application architecture, its
design, deployment, and performance. Therefore,
the user has to go through the process of matching
the application (structure and requirements) with
those components of the Grid infrastructure, as
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